IMDA fines Singtel $1m over fixed voice disruption in October 2024

Singtel said shared memory for its voice and broadband was overwhelmed by high traffic.

The Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) imposed a penalty of $1m on Singapore Telecommunications Limited (Singtel) for a disruption incident that affected about 500,000 of Singtel users in October 2024.

The incident affected about Singtel’s residential and corporate users for more than four hours, IMDA said.

The public’s access to customer service lines for some government agencies, healthcare organisations, banks and companies, and emergency call services was also affected, it added.

IMDA found that Singtel operated two virtualised firewalls on the same hardware, one for its fixed-line voice system and another for home broadband routers and pay TV set-top boxes.

Because both firewalls shared the same hardware memory resources, a failure in one system had implications for the other, the investigation found.

When traffic surged on 8 October 2024, the hardware’s shared memory resources were overwhelmed and caused the voice system’s firewall to malfunction and operate intermittently, it added.

The affected voice system was designed with an automatic failover mechanism that should have redirected voice traffic to a separate system, IMDA said, adding that this did not occur as intended because the virtualised firewall on the affected system was operating intermittently.

The issue was only resolved after Singtel fully transferred all voice traffic to the unaffected voice system.

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